Tag Archives: Account

We have offered free accounts to small nonprofits and schools/universities from the very beginning of Kerika’s existence, but this was always on an ad hoc basis: someone would occasionally ask us for a free account for their school or nonprofit team, and we would agree.

Looking back, we found that we agreed to almost 99% of all the requests that ever came to us: the only situations where we turned someone down were

When we couldn’t figure out what the nonprofit was doing, or even whether it really existed. (Having a domain for your school/nonprofit really helps, even if it is not in English.)

When the school was for-profit, (We dodn’t see why we should subsidize for-profit organizations.)

When the organization was essentially a governmental entity that was getting funded through public money in a normal way.

With these caveats aside, we have tried to be very generous and helpful for small organizations that are doing philanthropic work, or are schools.

But our old process for dealing with these requests was really haphazard, and when we implemented our new billing system and improved account management features, we also made it easier for us to grant nonprofit status to a much larger group of organizations, providing they are small teams.

Our new process makes everything much easier for schools and nonprofits: we are whitelisting entire domainsso that everyone from that domain who signs up automatically gets a free Academic & Nonprofit Account.

This means that only person ever needs to make a request on behalf of a school or university: if that gets approved, we will approve it for everyone from that school/university.

With a free Academic/Nonprofit Account you can have up to 10 people working on boards owned by that account: it doesn’t matter how many boards you have, or how big these boards are.

If you need more than 10 people, you will need to sign up for a Professional Account, which is $7 per user, per month (normally billed annually, as $84 per user).

Here’s a partial list of schools and universities we have already whitelisted for free service:

Yesterday we had our first instance of “leaver’s regret”: someone asked us to delete their Kerika account, and we acted promptly upon receiving that request.

Too promptly, as it turned out, because a couple of minutes the ex-user changed her mind. But by then it was too late: we had completed closed her account and deleted all the associated data.

Maybe we should be a little slower in responding to these requests? Deleting/closing an account is an irreversible action: we scrub all the boards owned by that account, and we don’t have any way of getting that data back. Our goal in implementing this process was to be very faithful to our privacy promises, namely that your data remains your data; it’s never Kerika’s data.

But, faced with this leaver’s regret situation, we are now thinking that maybe we should wait, for up to a day, before acting on these requests.

We have been offering free Kerika Accounts to schools and universities for many years now, and we have made this easier and more broadly available.

A free Academic Account lets the Account Owner have up to 10 Team Members working on boards owned by that Account, and this service is really intended to help small nonprofit groups benefit from Kerika.

With our new billing system we have added an admin feature that let’s Kerika staff whitelist an entire domain as Academic, which means that all accounts created within that domain will automatically get free Academic status.

If your school or college wants to use Kerika, let us know: we have already whitelisted dozens of domains.

We have made a small usability tweak/improvement to handle the (rare!) situation where you are part of someone’s Account, but for some reason the Account Owner is no longer sharing any boards with you.

A new feature that should help our customers better manage their account teams, particularly in large organizations: the Account Owner can export (in Excel format) a complete list of everyone working on any boards owned by that account.

This feature can be found in the Manage Users tab of your Account page:

Exporting Account Team Members

The exported data also includes the IP address last used by an account team member: this can help IT departments review their security periodically, or investigate any concerns they may have about misuse.

With the new billing system that we will be rolling out next week, Kerika will also be adding a slew of account management features that will make it much easier to purchase subscriptions, manage teams and handle your payments.

Manage Account options

The Manage Account screen has a new layout, with three tabs on the left: Account Summary, Manage Users, and Billing History.

Account Summary

This page has several sections, starting with your Account Name at the top. When you create an Account, you can give it any name that you like, and on this page you can change it if needed. Changes to the Account Name are shown instantly to everyone who is viewing boards owned by your Account.

Next is a section that lets you manage your Kerika subscriptions. You can see which plan you are currently on — Individual, Nonprofit or Professional — and switch to a different plan if needed.

People on a paid Professional Plan can manage the number of subscriptions they currently have (you need enough to cover your current Account Team, which consists of everyone who is currently a Board Admin or Team Member on the boards owned by your Account.)

Managing your Professional Plan is easy: you can increase the number of subscriptions you have, or decrease them.

Manage Professional Plan

All subscriptions have the same end-date: this makes annual reviews and renewals easy for Account Owners. You can also decide whether you want to turn on, or off automatic renewals of your subscriptions.

Changing number of subscriptions

In the example shown above, the user is increasing the number of subscriptions from 20 to 25. The system reminds the user that he needs at least 20, for the size of his current Account Team.

Confirm purchase

With our new billing system, it’s easy to make purchases online, or request that an invoice be sent to you.

If your Account currently has a credit balance, because you had reduced the number of subscriptions, this is reflected in your purchase: by default a credit balance is applied to future purchases, but you can also request a check be mailed to you if you don’t plan to use your credit balance.

If you are located in Washington State (in the USA) we may be required to charge you Washington State Sales Tax. You can specify whether this applies to you by updating your BillingInformation:

One useful new feature we have added is the concept of Billing Contacts:

Billing Contacts

Billing Contacts can be any set of people who need to get copies of all your Kerika transactions, e.g. your manager or Purchasing Department. Every purchase will generate a PDF for the transaction which will be automatically emailed to all the Billing Contacts for the Account.

Billing Contacts can include people from outside your organization, e.g. if you use a bookkeeping service from another company. Billing Contacts only get copies of your receipts and invoices; they don’t have access to your boards, and are not considered part of your Account Team.

Manage Users

The Manage Users page has been enhanced as well: you can see at a glance who is currently part of your Account Team, and now it is possible to invite someone to join the Account as a whole: previously people could be invited to join only a specific board.

Manage Users

For each member of your Account Team, Kerika will list the date when they joined your Account, the date of their last login, and the total number of boards where they are currently a Board Admin or Team Member.

This makes it easy to see at a glance how active someone is, if you are wondering whether to continue paying for their subscriptions.

(Note: in some cases the “Joined Team” information may not be available if it was months or years in the past; we didn’t start tracking this information until we started building the new billing system.)

Selecting a member of your Account Team offers additional actions:

Account Team actions

Clicking on the View button gives you a more detailed view of particular member of your Account Team:

Account Team Member detail

One new feature is you can see the IP address last used by the team member: this can be helpful in security reviews.

With the Manage User button, you can also remove someone from your Account Team altogether, demote their role to Visitor (across all boards owned by that account).

Remove from Account Team

Billing History

Going forward, all transactions — including online and offline payments — will be tracked automatically by the new billing system.

We will start keeping a history of your transactions going forward (we won’t have all the old transactions; sorry) and they can be accessed through the Billing History page:

Billing History

If you have an overdue invoice — and we sincerely hope you don’t! — you can pay it online, or request it to be resent to the billing contacts for the Account:

Overdue Invoice

Summary

The new billing system took a lot of work, over many months, but it was long overdue: our old billing process was largely manual, and somewhat error-prone.

Unlike some of our competitors, we understand that even though Kerika is software-as-a-service (SaaS), not everyone is set up to make online purchases. That’s why we have made it equally easy for people to receive invoices and make payments offline, e.g. by bank check or funds transfer, and have these transactions show up inside their Kerika account with the same flexibility as online purchases.

With our latest update, launched over the weekend, we have made some significant changes to how users access multiple Kerika accounts.

The motivation for all this is simple: our old billing mechanism was manual and error-prone. It was difficult to track which accounts had paid for subscriptions and to ensure that subscriptions were renewed in a timely manner.

So we are moving to an completely automated system that will allow our customers to manage their subscriptions more easily, make online or offline purchases, and manage their account teams.

We are about halfway there: we have done the changes to the account management piece, and have some more work before the billing system is ready.

One consequence of this is the way you view your Home Page has changed: the Home will now always show the boards and templates that related to a single account, rather than across multiple accounts.

Home Board

(Previously there were three buckets: Favorites, Owned by Me, and Shared With Me.)

Switching between all your open boards, and all your accounts, has been consolidated into a single Account Switcher function that appears on the top-left corner of the Kerika app, where the old Board Switcher used to be:

Changes to Board Switcher

Clicking on the Account Switcher will let you switch between boards, and between accounts:

Board Switcher menu

Calendar syncing and Preferences are now applied on an account level, so if you are working in multiple accounts, you can choose to have different preferences for each account.

You can access your Calendar and Preferences settings by clicking on your face on the upper-right corner of the Kerika app:

Calendar and Preferences

With this change, it becomes more important for organizations to consolidate ownership of all their boards within a single account. You can do this yourself, by selecting boards from your Home Page and using the Move to Another Account function:

Move to another Account

You can also let us do this for you: just contact us at info@kerika.com, and let us know which accounts you would like to consolidate and we can do all the work.